Thursday, 17 March 2011

Winter ML skills on Aonach Mor.

After my day out with Hannah last week when the weather was pretty nasty we head up to the Nid area again. For today Hannah had put some thought into the things she wanted to look at or revisit. We made our way round the bottom of the Nid to keep an eye out for any good spots to practice ice axe arrest later in the day. We put our crampons on and headed up hill. One of the things Hannah wanted to look at was managing a group on steeper ground so we had a look at bringing people up or lowering them and also built a bollard so Hannah could protect herself as she abseiled over the cornice to check the slope below.

Hannah peering over the cornice.

Once She was happy with this we walked a way down the Nid and I got Hannah to lower me down some steeper ground this time using a bucket seat with a bollard. We continued down to a spot we had seen earlier and had a good session on ice axe arrest looking at possible ways of teaching these skills to a group.

It was a nice day to be out with a lot of sunshine and only a few showers passing through. What was coming down in the showers though was large grains of graupel and these were very quickly building on Easterly aspects. There is snow forecast for tonight and tomorrow and this layer of graupel might cause some issues if it is buried.